I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia (31 page)

What happens when most other people get Facebook messages from long-lost boyfriends or girlfriends? Maybe there is a sudden flood of various emotions? A rush of warm, sweet, familiar
pain in the chest? Possibly a surge of significant memories—vivid images of long, sweet kisses in doorways, of hushed late-night conversations on the telephone, of bodies coming together lovingly under crisp sheets? Or maybe instead there are overwhelmingly less favorable emotions: jealousy, resentment, anxiety, or insecurity.

I, of course, didn’t get any of those feelings, sensations, or emotions, good or bad. Neal wasn’t an actual, flesh-and-blood memory to me. He was simply another character in another set of stories I had been told about. I had absolutely no real recollections of Neal, no emotional investment in our earlier relationship whatsoever. Was this “Neal Moore” my first real love? Friends and family assured me that he was, but what did that matter, if all trace of that love had been wiped from my memory? But then I began to wonder. There had been a point when I hadn’t remembered my parents or my brothers and sisters. There had been a point when I had not had any vivid images of my kids. There had been a time when I had no real feelings for my husband. And yet the expectation, and eventually the reality, was that I loved all of these people. Was this really any different? Neal and I had loved each other passionately in some kind of previous life. That was a fact. And the facts kept coming.

Already, fate had delivered me two previous chances to reunite with Neal, and I had failed to follow through either time. The first chance was a decade ago, when I was visiting my friend Kathy in Pennsylvania, near where my family once lived. “We got in the car and went for a ride,” Kathy recalls. “You wanted to see the house you grew up in, in Chesterbrook. We went and looked at your house, but you had no recollection of it. Over the course of our conversations about the good ol’ days, I said, ‘You know, maybe Neal is in the phone book.’ ” I had no particular reaction to that
thought. Entirely on her own initiative, Kathy dug out a phone book, pawed through it, and found a listing for Neal’s family in Phoenixville, the suburb where Kathy, not I, remembered his family had lived. She wrote down the number on a sheet of paper and handed it to me; she seemed excited at the prospect that I might call him. I didn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe I wasn’t ready yet. I kept that piece of paper with his family’s phone number on it stashed at the bottom of my underwear drawer.

The second chance came years later, when I was in Pennsylvania again, this time on a college-looking trip with Kassidy. On this trip, I met up with an old friend from my high school marching-band drum line, a man named Lenny Brown. Lenny had friended me on Facebook months before, and I messaged him that I was going to be in Wayne for a day or two with my daughter, and did he and his wife want to meet to catch up? Lenny and Mary met us at a restaurant in King of Prussia. We talked, and Neal’s name came up again. When I returned home, I mentioned Neal to Jim. Jim remembers saying, “Well, Su, we can probably find him if you want. And we got so far as a phone number and e-mail address. And I thought you had initiated it then.” I hadn’t. I don’t know why. I guess I still wasn’t ready. But I printed the records from the computer and kept that information in the same drawer.

But this situation was different: This time, Neal had contacted me.

I really had no idea what I was starting when I wrote my first Facebook message to Neal. Hell, I didn’t even know for sure if this was the same Neal Moore I had dated almost thirty years earlier. Neal Moore. It’s not such an unusual name; and of course I kept
thinking the author of this friend request, with his anonymous Facebook page, might be nothing but another weirdo.

Late in the morning of June 20, I wrote: “Are you the Neal Moore that I have heard about for so many years? If so, I would love to talk to you at some point and have you fill in some gaps.” That was a generic enough reply, I thought. There was a lot I didn’t know about my time in high school. The tales I always heard about my school years before going to college at Ohio Wesleyan were full of wild pranks, drunken incidents, long stretches of dark emotional moods, and constant battles with my parents. Certainly nothing very positive was ever related to me. Would Neal, if he was the Neal of my youth, just have more of the same?

I held my breath.

A reply came two days later: “I don’t know what you’ve been told or not told about me, but to answer your question in a word, yes. I can’t believe it’s really you!” I was about to learn a lot more about Neal, and a lot more about myself. Remember, at the moment I made contact with Neal, the total sum of my knowledge of my three-year relationship with this man would have fit into this one single paragraph.

A week earlier, Jim and I and my amnesia had all been guests on NBC’s
Today
show. An old friend of Neal’s watched the show, heard my story, and noted the odd spelling of my name. Neal recalls: “She e-mailed me and said, ‘Did you watch the
Today
show this morning?’ And I said, ‘I never watch the
Today
show.’ And she said, ‘Well, you might be interested in this, because I think I saw Su as a guest.’ And I said, ‘It can’t be, because Su died in a car accident twenty years ago.’ ”

Neal and I had dated for three years. Then the relationship had mysteriously evaporated. Then I had died—or so Neal thought. Losing me had pushed Neal into a sort of hibernation. For the next few years, he threw himself into work and study, moving out of his parents’ home and living in solitude, avoiding old friends and new girlfriends. His parents feared for his health. It was the first time since the start of high school that Neal wasn’t attached.

From Neal’s perspective, our relationship had lacked a proper ending. When I left for college, we were all but engaged. We had a wedding date, if only in our own minds. And then Neal had visited me at college and found me distant and kind of standoffish with him. When I returned home after just one trimester for winter break, I was in an unwavering, unreadable sulk.

“Christmas break we were together,” Neal recalls. “It was initially tearful. You were upset. I was upset.” It was on that visit, apparently, that I told Neal about Jim. “You just put it out there as somebody you met at school, and you were dating him there, but when you were with me, you wanted to be with me.” After the break, I went back to school and Neal recalls, “We continued on like nothing had happened. During the following summer when you were back home and working at Picket Post Swim and Tennis Club, I thought everything was back to normal with us. Because it was. And then your letters stopped coming abruptly during the end of your second year at school.”

The following year, 1985, Neal ran into one of my friends. She told him a wrenching story: “You were on a highway near Delaware, Ohio. You were coming home from a weekend, or something like that. You were passing a tractor trailer, and you came out around it, and it was a head-on collision. I remember sitting on
the edge of my parents’ bed in their bedroom and telling them.” My parents had moved to Houston, Texas, by the time Neal heard about this, so he had no real way to check the story out. In those pre-Internet eighties, he could find no obituary, no record of my passing. And of course by then I was no longer Su Miller. I had married Jim in May of 1985, and was now Su Meck.

Back in the present, Neal’s friend persisted: “The name is Su Meck, but it’s
S-U,
like Su used to spell it, and this woman looks just like Su, only older.” Neal sat in his office at work that morning and searched online for the
Today
show video. He found it and clicked on the link.

Neal recalls: “A woman I work with came into my office and said, ‘What’s the matter? You’re white.’ And she sat and watched it with me, and she said, ‘Is that the girl you talked about?’ Anybody who knows me knows about Su. And she said, ‘Well, she doesn’t look dead.’ And pretty soon all the women in my office were watching this recording with me. And they were all like, ‘Contact her, contact her!’ And I didn’t know how to contact you.”

Neal found me on Google first. Then he opened a Facebook account and dispatched his first friend request on June 20, 2011.

After getting past the initial surprise that I was indeed the long-lost, ex-dead girlfriend, Neal and I fell into a comfortable Facebook relationship, swapping stories about our current family situations, kids, spouses, careers, music, and hobbies in an effort to become reacquainted. Neal told me he was married with two children. He and his family were living near his childhood home outside Philadelphia, and he was working as CFO at a company that provides video on demand for hotels and resorts. I told him I was married with three grown children. The domestic revelations cleared the air of any potential romantic tension.

Reconnecting with anyone who knew me before my injury has always been especially tricky for me. My behavior typically follows a predictable pattern: I remain cheerful but noncommittal as I unconsciously work constantly to figure out what the expectations in this new relationship might be. Then, also unintentionally, I labor to mold myself into whatever person I can be to fulfill those expectations and make the other person “happy.” This is never entirely fair to me or to the person I am meeting. I know that. But I still do it, and I don’t even realize what it is I’m doing until I stop and think about it much, much later.

With Neal, I made an effort almost immediately to direct our conversations into the past. I wanted to hear how we first met, if we had known each other before dating, if he had graduated from Conestoga High School, how long we dated, what kind of stuff we did together. I had nothing but questions for this poor man. In my first messages to him, I downplayed the shock of rediscovering such a major character from my long-lost past. But inside I was jumping for joy! Here was a person who just might be able to fill in countless gaps from that time and answer innumerable questions. Neal had absolutely no reason to lie and no motive to try to protect me. I got the feeling almost instantly from him that if I asked him a question, he would be most liable to answer me straight, without any spin. Neal Moore could conceivably be a terrific source of valuable information for me!

Neal told me about my car accident. I replied with a smiley face, “I was not killed in a car crash . . . just hit with a ceiling fan.” Incidentally, I found out when writing this book that Jim and I were in fact in a car accident on our way to Cuyahoga Falls for a
weekend family gathering late in the fall of my sophomore year. Jim had invited me just to get off campus for the weekend. During that accident, my head had hit the windshield of Jim’s Malibu, and I had been taken to the emergency room. Jim’s car was smunched, and I had a fairly serious concussion, but I certainly hadn’t died.

Then Neal began to fill in the many details and exact particulars of our long-ago romance. He was a projectionist at the cinema and a teller at a bank; I was a lifeguard at the swim and tennis club in my family’s neighborhood of Chesterbrook. He was older and had graduated from Phoenixville High School but he had agreed to take me to my Conestoga homecoming dances and proms. We spent summer days, when we weren’t working, at his family’s pool. I would write him little notes and decorate them with hearts, stars, and doodles. I told Neal that sounded so “girlie.” No, he said, I was more the “romantic tomboy.” He said he had a box filled with graduation pictures, prom pictures, and letters I’d written him, but all of it had been destroyed four months earlier in a basement flood. Very bad timing.